Have you taken a good look at your cell phone bill recently? You think you know what you’re getting into and what you’ll pay, but then once you read the items one by one, you notice fees and charges for just about everything. The worst of it is, you have no choice but to keep paying until the end of your contract. Well, with Walmart’s Straight Talk Wireless, you can get Unlimited talk, text, and data for $45 a month, with absolutely no contract. You have access to all the same cellular networks, with the same coverage and speeds for basically half the cost of similar unlimited plans.

You’re also not limited to using specific phones, but can bring your own device, keep the same phone number and stay on the same network with the “Straight Talk Bring Your Own Phone program”. That means you’ll continue to enjoy the coverage and reliability you’ve grown used to without paying the outrageous fees.

If you decide to buy a phone from Straight Talk Wireless, you have access to a laundry list of devices with prices starting as low as $39.95. To give you an idea, the iPhone 5c will set you back $299 while the LG L34C Optimus Fuel Android Smartphone, a full-featured smartphone, is just $29.88!

South Korea’s science ministry has been discussing their next generation of mobile service, and the numbers are dizzying. While the current 4G service there already trumps that of pretty much anywhere with their 300 Mbps “3band-LTE-A” connections available by the end of the year, that still pales in comparison to what they have planned for 5G. See, by 2020, there are plans for speeds 1,000 times greater! This means you could download a full 800MB movie in one second. What? One second? That’s right, in the time it took you to read these last few words, you could have downloaded a full movie. If HD is your thing, you would only have to spend 5.12 seconds to grab 4.6GB.

What’s more, the service will be available even on bullet trains that travel 310 miles per hour. What? They have trains that ravel that fast? We sort of knew this, but it’s only when you start looking at the whole picture that you realize just how far behind our infrastructure is, right here in North America. 310 miles per hour bullet trains, 5G cellular service that downloads an HD movie in 5 seconds? Come on… they’re past making us look bad, now they’re just gloating.

The above is a visualization by Nickolay Lamm that shows us what Chicago would look like if cellular signals were visible with the naked eye. It’s trippy and fascinating, and above all it isn’t just a fanciful interpretation, but is based on some solid understanding of how our cellular infrastructure works. “Danilo Erricolo, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago and Fran Harackiewicz, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Southern Illinois University Carbondale—who consulted on the psychedelic project—explain:”

A regular, hexagonal grid of cellular base-station sites is conceptualized for Chicago [above], with stations at the corners of the hexagons. The area within each sector antenna radiation pattern has different users being assigned different frequencies and their signals combine to form a single perceived color in that instant. Different channel combinations from sector to sector are indicated by different colors. The channel combinations shown are not static, but rather change rapidly in time as different users are assigned different channels. But, if you were to take a photo of these rapid changes, you’d likely see a wide array of colors as seen in the illustration. Near the downtown area more users are likely to be found and the hexagonal cells are smaller to serve approximately the same numbers of users found in larger cells elsewhere. Antenna signals extending beyond the original cells provide coverage over part of Lake Michigan.

We are surrounded by an always-on cacophony of electromagnetic radiation; it’s a blessing that our eyes are only able to see a small sliver of it. Visualizing it only serves as a fascinating reminder of this.

Let’s not get into the legality of this device. But if you have a need to listen in on conversations for whatever reason, the Spy Bug Audio Surveillance gadget pictured above should do the trick. About as small as a pack of matches, it accepts a SIM card, which means you can just call it anytime you want to eavesdrop. Better yet, you can set it so that anytime there’s a sound above 45dB within 10m, it calls you!

- Use with any mobile SIM card (We recomend Verizon Wireless): Insert the SIM card; conceal the device where it can’t be seen; dial the SIM card phone number from your phone; now you can listen in!

Again, not sure how legal something like this is in your jurisdictions, so use wisely. It’s $60.

“Yo dawg… we heard you like phones. So we gave your phone a phone.” Yeah. That’s pretty much what’s going on here. See, the Blutooth Handset TK2 connects to your cellphone through Bluetooth and all it does is allow you to speak (and listen, duh). The thing is… you’re supposed to hold it in your hand. Like a phone! So in a way, it’s a smaller phone that you use… to use your phone. It has no other point. It doesn’t free your hands, it does the opposite.

Granted you can pair it with more than your cellphone, so perhaps this can be a tiny VoIP device… Or something. It does feature Bluetooth v2.1, which means you could pair it to your cellphone and something else simultaneously. So maybe you can eke out a use that way. Like if you’re at home and are taking Skype and cellular calls.

OhGizmo! is a frequently updated blog that focuses on covering items that will appeal to a very specific and often very passionate audience: the geek. Aside from the fare of innovative consumer electronic products, the reader can expect to find news about geek culture, absurd inventions, awe inspiring technology, and an ever growing assortment of articles that we like to think fit within our view of what we’re calling the Geek Lifestyle.